Customer Reviews

Practical Oracle8i™: Building Efficient Databases

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Whatever the job, Oracle offers many different ways to do it, and they are not all equal. This book is an invaluable aid in deciding which features to choose and how to use them. Each feature is clearly explained with some real-world illustrations of how it might be used. The author then examines the potential functionality, performance, security, and maintenance traps associated with the feature and concludes with some helpful guidelines on when and how to use it (or not).

The style is relaxed and personal, but there is no lack of technical accuracy, and although the main arguments and recommendations are accessible to relative newcomers to Oracle, many of the detailed explanations assume considerable familiarity with Oracle system architecture and performance issues. In summary, this book is particularly valuable for people who are designing new Oracle-based systems, but has plenty of practical advice for all Oracle developers and DBAs.

Unlike many other weighty tomes regarding Oracle, this book does much more than reword the 8i Concepts manual. There is a lot in this book, but if you just read the "Problems & Quirks" and "Strategy Notes" sections at the end of each chapter you'll be well on your way to understanding the implications of using 8i features.

One concern many people have when experimenting with database features is how to be sure it's working properly. Jonathan's book goes a long way to help with this as with most of his examples, some low-level tracing or queries are provided to prove the point.

Overall, a superbly detailed and valuable addition to my Oracle library.

This may be the best Oracle book I've found so far.

A lot of books seem to give canned explanations of how oracle works - geared towards rote memorization as opposed to understanding. This book does a great job of taking the next step.

For example, The detail with which the author goes through the process of how updating a row actually works in an Oracle database was tremendous. His explanation of how a select statement could actually cause a row to be marked as committed ( i.e. a read causes a write ) was great.

I've only been a DBA (or pseudo-DBA) for about 6 months now, so I'm certainly no expert in this area. Yet I found all of his explanations very clear and easy to understand.

If you're looking for a new Oracle book, get this one.

I have dozens of Oracle books and this the single best one. I think I'm going to get extra copies so I can assign reading it to everyone who works for me. The content should be the basic starting point of knowledge for serious development and management. I just wish it was updated for 9i

I can't imagine a better introduction to the Oracle RDBMS. The author's conversational style is more akin to a discussion among colleagues, rather than a professor lecturing a student. A quick scan of the table of contents reveals a clearly organized sequence of topics, making it easy for the reader to dive into a subject of particular interest. By randomly scanning through a half dozen chapters, I was able to quickly develop a solid feel for Oracle's implementation of tables, objects, partitioning, indexing, and data integrity. This text provides a great overview of the Oracle RDBMS, and a solid foundation for any potential database administrators.

This is not like most of the other 1000-page tomes about Oracle (although some of them are excellent), in that it gets "under the hood" of just how Oracle works. I find that I understand how to use something much better if I have some idea of how it works, and Jonathan gives it to you in great detail. Even though this is a very technical book, it is easy to read if you are already an experienced Oracle DBA or developer. It is well written and very useful. Highly recommended.

Jonathan has written a book, or more a series of essays, that digs deep into the foundations of Oracle and seems to ooze with information and experience. I must admit that when I first picked up the book, I found it perhaps less organized than I would like, and this makes finding things sometimes a bit more difficult, and might seemingly disqualify this book as a desktop reference book. You probably won't be picking up this book to find out what the syntax for creating a partitioned index should look like, but thats ok, there is a great need for books that go beyond reference, and this one does in spades. The indexing is pretty good, so the lack of super orginization is mitigated.

The only other complaint that I could make about this book is that it was not long enough. You come away thinking that the author probably has a great more to share with us, but just didn't have the pages. Jonathan leaves you with substance, and the benefit of experience and knowledge beyond the standard set of Oracle documentation. He has given the Oracle DBA food for thought, and for that, this book is worth five stars and the price.

Denizens of comp.databases.oracle.server have long known Mr. Lewis to be a knowledgeable and articulate writer about the workings of the Oracle RDBMS. I was delighted to hear that he was writing a book, and this one does not disappoint.

Lewis seems to know exactly when to give a broad overview of a subject, and when to zoom in on a telling detail. In contrast, many books about Oracle are either numbingly boring lists of minutiae, or frustratingly useless, detail-free summaries.

Lewis is such a good writer that one could, I imagine, pick up this book and read it front to back. I suspect most readers will do as I have -- find chapters that address some specific problem. This week I'm reading chapters 6 & 7 on indexing. It's certainly going to save my company thousands of dollars, and it looks like it's going to speed up the database a good bit, too. If I can make my boss and our users happy at the same time, I'd call that the best of all possible results, and "Practical Oracle 8i" the best Oracle book I've read.

Six stars for this terse, witty and technically deep guide to achieving well-designed Oracle8i implementations using the newest features. Mr Lewis achieves a great balance between technical details on the one hand and broad business purposes on the other. The examples are short and incisively instructive.

The book can be read from anywhere as many topics are independent and self-contained (I began with Appendix B, a brilliantly short tuning guide).

Hats off to Mr Lewis for introducing what should become a classic.

Before reading this book, I was getting tired of books that just repeated the manual, adding little information.

This resourceful book is for experienced DBAs / developers that want new ideas about Oracle database design.